Facebook Status Updates Jump on Valentine's

Joanna Stern

ABC News•February 14, 2013

Facebook Status Updates Jump on Valentine's (ABC News)

A scroll through this writers' Facebook Newsfeed today showed lots of pictures of flowers, chocolates and candies. There's no doubt it's Valentine's Day. But sprinkled among those images were notifications that three friends were now "in a relationship."

According to Facebook, Valentine's Day is the biggest day of the year for letting the Facebook world know about your relationship by adding a "relationship status" to your Timeline. Facebook says that 200 percent more relationships are added on February 14 compared to any other day of the year. Also, more than 70 percent of those people who list their status on Facebook first met on Valentine's Day.

What Facebook doesn't have are stats about the most popular time or day to go from being "in a relationship" to "no longer in a relationship." Virgin Mobile and OkCupid dubbed yesterday, Feb. 13, "National Breakup Day." They reported that 59 percent of people said that if they were going to break up with someone, they would do so just before Valentine's Day to save money.

If that's so, we'd think many people changed their statuses yesterday or over the last few weeks, but we guess that when it comes to declaring your love publicly on Facebook, it's complicated.